Archive for the ‘Pastoral Ministry’ Category

Building a better prayer life through research and data may sound like a strange concept, but that is exactly what Jesuit Father Bill Watson is doing through the Sacred Story Institute (SSI).

A national Ignatian apostolate founded a year ago, SSI is based in Seattle. The Institute’s focus is to bring St. Ignatius’s Examination of Conscience, known as the Examen, to modern audiences and help them use it in their prayer lives. The Institute also collects data from those using its prayer method to learn about their experiences for the purpose of shaping more intuitive and strategic spiritual formation resources.

Fr. Watson’s ultimate goal is to help people pray and connect personally to Christ, so as to know how best to serve the Kingdom — the goal of the Spiritual Exercises. “We tend to focus on our spiritual life when we’re in a spiritual context, like Mass on Sunday,” he says. “I’m focused on how can we take Ignatian spirituality and use it for evangelization to a much broader audience than just those who may come to a retreat center.”

Fr. Watson has been engaged in retreat work for three decades, including as Director of Retreat Programs at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Vice President for Jesuit Identity & Mission at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash.

Through his retreat work, Fr. Watson says, “I became keenly aware that you can give people the best retreat experience, but the big challenge is to keep people spiritually connected to God after the retreat when they go back to their busy lives.”

Since recommitting to the Examen while on sabbatical 20 years ago, Fr. Watson has focused much of his work on this five-step reflective prayer.

During the Sacred Story Institute’s first research project this past year, hundreds of people from six Seattle parishes took part in a 40-week Examen course based on a new method of the Examen that Fr. Watson developed in his recent book: “Sacred Story-An Ignatian Examen for the Third Millennium.” They also did weekly surveys, providing the Institute’s research director, Mr. Joseph Youngblood, with data about their experiences.

“We’re research-focused,” says Fr. Watson, “but the purpose of the research is to build smarter spiritual resources that can help people grow.”

In addition to developing and offering the Examen course and collecting data from those who participate, the Sacred Story Institute decided to do its own publishing. Fr. Watson said the Institute plans on doing quite a bit of publishing, and managing its own book portfolio gives it greater flexibility. In the spring, the Institute will publish its second book, “Forty Weeks—An Ignatian Path to Christ with Sacred Story Prayer,” a popular version of the short Sacred Story method in the book of the same name.

In its second year, Fr. Watson says the Institute is using the Sacred Story Examen method to construct K-8 Conscience Formation resources for K-8 students. As part of the project, the Institute, through the Archdiocese’s Offices of Adult Faith Formation and Catholic Schools, is offering its 40-week program to all K-8 teachers in the Seattle Archdiocese’s schools.

The Institute will also customize the prayer program for different audiences: pastoral ministers and teachers;  married and engaged couples; persons contemplating vocations; people with addictions; and other groups that approach the Institute for special research applications of the Sacred Story method.  A long-term goal is to have research offices in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Learn more about the Sacred Story Institute at www.sacredstory.net, where a web-based version of the 40-week Examen course is available for individual use.

Jesuit Father Joseph Bruce is one of the few priests in the world who has been deaf since childhood and the first deaf Jesuit priest. This hasn’t stopped him from ministering to both the hearing and the deaf. Fr. Bruce reads lips, knows many variations of sign language and speaks clearly — despite never having heard a spoken word in his whole life.

Currently Fr. Bruce ministers to a predominately deaf congregation in Landover, Md. He is one of eight deaf priests in the United States today, and when he was ordained to the priesthood in 1981, there was only one other deaf priest in the country.

Fr. Bruce said he first thought of becoming a priest while attending the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., when Jesuit Father Joseph LaBran suggested he become a Jesuit priest. “I responded by saying that the church did not allow deaf men to be ordained priests,” Fr. Bruce recalls. “Then Fr. LaBran said, ‘God is full of surprises. He can change things whenever he wants to.’ After that I began to think about it.”

Fr. Bruce says the greatest challenge in serving people is being able to lip-read. “Every person moves his or her lips differently when they speak,” he says. “Lipreading is very tiring. Lipreading every day is like running the Boston Marathon every day!”

He also recalls challenges as an undergrad. He wanted to be a Spanish major, but the modern language department wouldn’t allow it because he couldn’t “hear Spanish.” So Fr. Bruce asked if he could major in English, and he was given permission. “I remember keeping my fingers crossed, hoping that no one realized that I can’t hear English either!”

He also prevailed, after setbacks, to become a priest. Fr. Bruce applied to the diocese and the Franciscans, but both told him no. The Dominicans didn’t reply. Finally, the Society of Jesus said yes.

Today Fr. Bruce does pastoral ministry for the deaf community in the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. Marlana Portolano attends St. Francis of Assisi, the predominantly deaf parish where Fr. Bruce ministers and where her daughter attends catechism classes in sign language.

Portolano writes in America magazine, “In order to embrace the Catholic faith, my daughter needed to receive direct communication in a language she could see and understand. In signing the Mass, Father Joe, as he is known, opened my daughter’s eyes to essential practices of Catholicism. Every week Father Joe is able to hold the rapt attention of the entire congregation, even when he does not speak at all.”

To read more about Fr. Bruce, visit America magazine, The B.C. Catholic and the Rhode Island Catholic.

Jesuit Father Rocco Danzi, director of campus ministry at Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City, N.J., was a guest on The Busted Halo Show with Fr. Dave Dwyer last fall, where he discussed vocations, spirituality, pastoral ministry and what inspired him to join the Society of Jesus. “The movie that fired me up for the Jesuits was ‘The Mission,’ Fr. Danzi recalls. “I began to say to myself, what if I joined this group and found myself going over a waterfall? Well you have to watch what you ask for!”

Fr. Danzi first encountered real-life Jesuits when he attended Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. After college he was working as a teacher when he began to discern his vocation to the priesthood. Fr. Danzi says he felt a calling to the Society but was resistant because he was not sure he fit in. “I was selling myself short because the Jesuits I knew had doctorates and were professors at St. Joe’s,” he explains.

With encouragement he met with the Jesuits and entered the Society in 1989. “My own ministry as a Jesuit has been very pastoral. As a Jesuit you can do all sorts of things, with or without a doctorate,” says Fr. Danzi. “It’s not the degree, it’s the heart. It’s the call within the call and discerning what kind of ministry excites you the most.”

As a campus minister, Fr. Danzi has enjoyed going on service trips with the students and says that many young adults are not sure about the prayer portion of the trip before they go. Fr. Danzi says that often changes. “Service seems to trigger and bring forth a lot of personal and spiritual things that come to the surface,” he says.

Fr. Danzi has been inspired by his own service trips to Haiti while he was a Jesuit novice. “It’s a place where I really encountered God and found that strength to keep going on that journey toward Jesuit priesthood and Jesuit ministry,” says Fr. Danzi.

Listen to the entire interview with Fr. Danzi at the New York Province website.

Jesuit Father Jeff Putthoff (right) with a cross planted for a Camden, N.J., homicide victim.

Jesuit Father Jeff Putthoff ministers in Camden, N.J., a city that experienced a record-breaking number of homicides in 2012. “I have learned that poverty is not pretty, nor is it romantic. The traumatic experiences of violence, abuse and endemic poverty deeply wound the people of Camden,” says Fr. Putthoff.

Fr. Putthoff founded and runs Hopeworks ‘N Camden, which trains youth in technology and helps them get back to school and away from the violence that plagues their hometown.

Among the 67 killed in Camden in 2012, 34 were younger than age 30; 11 were teenagers; one was 2 years old and another was 6 years old. Fr. Putthoff was one of the organizers of a new group, Stop the Trauma, Violence and Murder, which has a Facebook page documenting both the ongoing violence in the city and activities to bring attention to the problem, including painting and planting of crosses for victims.

“Camden is a place that is very bloody and disfigured, and it bothers us fundamentally to look at it because if we acknowledge it as disfigured, then we have to do something about it,” Fr. Putthoff told the National Catholic Reporter. “The alternative, what most do, is avert our gaze and find ways to justify it. We either make it invisible or we blame people for it.”

Fr. Putthoff and the staff of Hopeworks understand that changing lives go beyond teaching new skills. It also means they must help the youth to see possibilities that would have been previously unimaginable.

Fr. Putthoff  said that even many from the program who “succeeded,” by moving on to college or to good jobs, often sabotaged that success by acting out inappropriately under stressful circumstances.

“What’s important is recognizing that even if we had no crosses, we’d still be saying, ‘Stop the trauma,’ because people are living an existence that is only about survival and not thriving,” Fr. Putthoff said. “They learn a whole set of behaviors to help them survive, but lamentably, those behaviors don’t help them thrive.”

The Hopeworks staff is currently undergoing a two-year training program to be certified in “trauma-informed delivery of services.”

“We believe that we’re operating more and more out of a model of trauma where our youth basically have a form of PTSD and their survival mechanism doesn’t allow them to actually move forward,” Fr. Putthoff said.

For more on Fr. Putthoff’s ministry in Camden, visit the National Catholic Reporter and the Jesuit Curia’s Social Justice blog.

The Jesuits’ Gesu Church in downtown Miami, the city’s oldest Catholic church, was recently renovated, and the pastor says the aesthetic improvement is only half the story. “We have always wanted to revive our presence in the heart of downtown because the area itself has been developed and the Catholic Church was not going to fall behind,” says Jesuit Father Eddy Alvarez, Gesu’s pastor.

The iconic downtown church dates to 1922, and in the last few months the building has gone through a transformation that’s included restoring the bell tower, painting the facade with new colors, revitalizing the interior and adding the emblem of the Society of Jesus. “We needed to modernize and attract new Catholics who have moved to the area,” says Fr. Alvarez.

Because the church is so close to the ocean, the salt residue and humidity had taken a toll on the building’s frame with cracks and other forms of dangerous deterioration, according to Jesuit Father Eduardo Barrios.

Today, there are three Jesuit priests working at the parish, which has seen growth and diversification of its parishioners, particularly following an influx of young professionals to the area.

“It now has a fresher look while maintaining its original beauty,” says parishioner Alberto Carrillo of the renovated church. “It’s very inviting if you are Catholic.”

To reaffirm the Gesu’s Jesuit identity, the IHS emblem — derived from the first three letters of the Greek name of Jesus and featured in the Society’s crest — has been emphasized throughout the church. IHS is welded to the bars on doors and windows and is also painted on the panels containing the Creed along the Stations of the Cross.

Read the full article and see more images at the Miami Herald website.